This is very true in the industry. I have 20 years developent experience, and my OO experience started with C++, continued with Delphi, and now includes C#. IMHO, almost all the modern large projects I have worked in (using C#) suffer ridiculous over-layering and over-abstraction, to the point where absolutely nobody outside the lead designer has any idea how it all works. This seems to be so common that I can only imagine it is being taught at Universities and filtered through to those in the field. The main issue with this is that many of the lead developers seem not to know how to use their brains to determine whether a particular idea is actually useful to the project, rather than implementing, almost by rote, what they seem to know. It seems that many, if not the majority, of software developers these days do not seem to know how to think. Thinking takes time, and you cannot churn out code while you are thinking. I find it strange to watch some developers hitting their keyboard anywhere up to 90% of the time they are sitting at their desk. For me this is rarely above 10%. My best work is done walking the dog, taking a shower, etc, when I cannot hit the keyboard, where I can let my mind wander and come up with different ideas about tacking existing problems, unconstrained by having to code it straight away.